If the big marathon story of 2017 was the Nike-sponsored Breaking2 Project, a meticulously controlled, closed-to-the-public attempt to get a few superstars to run obscenely fast in perfect conditions, Boston 2018 was the perfect foil for such elitism.

It was as though the marathon gods summoned a mid-April tempest just to remind us that the event isn’t supposed to be about the sterile pursuit of arbitrary records.